


You Could Never Hurt Me

by Goodnight_Stars



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Angst, Christmas, F/M, Holidays, Hurt/Comfort, Pike's accident, Telepathic Bond, Telepathy, sad vina, why did I write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:06:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28301322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goodnight_Stars/pseuds/Goodnight_Stars
Summary: Vina tries to contact Chris and finds out he's alone for Christmas, too....
Relationships: Christopher Pike/Vina
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	You Could Never Hurt Me

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this on Christmas feels and sad music and a friend I'm really worried about, so don't judge me, lol 😂

Celebrating holidays on Talos IV was always…lonely. The Talosians didn’t celebrate Earth holidays, and they hadn’t even celebrated their _own_ holidays since the war that had almost wiped them out, so they gave her strange looks every year when she insisted on throwing a telepathic party with imaginary people and decorating the caves with fake snow and hallucinated holly and mistletoe. They looked at her with even more confusion when she ended the party every year alone in a heap on her bed, crying her eyes out over a mug of hallucinated hot cocoa because she knew none of it was real.

Tonight she had decided to keep the imaginary Christopher Pike around because…well, something that looked like Pike was better than no Pike at all, but halfway through their imaginary glasses of wine, she burst into tears and threw her glass at him. It shattered into a million pieces.

“I'm done pretending,” she sobbed. “He loves me, somewhere out there…but you can’t love. You’re a puppet in a dream, doing whatever they make you do….”

Imaginary Chris looked hurt as he looked down at the disaster of wine and shattered glass all over his imaginary Christmas sweater and back up at Vina. “I...I’m sorry?”

“I can’t pretend you’re real tonight, not on Christmas,” she went on sobbing.

Imaginary Chris disappeared in the middle of making that innocent confused face he always made when she was upset with him. The broken glass disappeared, too, and the wine, and the mistletoe hanging over the fireplace where they were supposed to kiss later in the night, and the fireplace.

The voice of the Talosian magistrate came into her head. _The human is unhappy with the dream we have provided. A new source of happiness is required._ Vina sat up on the empty bed in the middle of the room. “I...I want to see the real Chris, not a fake one. I want to talk to him, once, for a few minutes…please let me see him.”

Her heart sang when the room started swimming around her…she closed her eyes and reached out with her heart, trying to find him. But everything was dim and shadowy…it had never felt like this before. _He must be far away,_ she thought.

 _Chris?_ she thought. _I can’t see you. Where are you?_

Something moved nearby in the shadows. It took her awhile to hear the words clearly, but then she recognized Chris’s voice, muffled and in his mind. _Don’t come any closer,_ he was saying.

_Chris! Is everything ok? Are you ok? What’s going on?_

_I’m fine,_ he lied.

_Chris, please...tell me what’s going on._

He stayed stubbornly silent. Her heart warmed because she knew why he was doing this, and it was so like him. So dear and unselfish...and totally unnecessary.

_Chris, you could never hurt me. The only way you’ll hurt me is by sending me away. Whatever it is, please, please let me in. I don’t need to be protected, I need to know you’re ok…._

She felt him still resisting her, trying to push her mind away by brute force. She didn’t want to force her way in, so she hovered nearby, out of reach. _I won’t leave you when you’re in trouble,_ she said gently. _I’ll wait here until you’re ok, until you fall asleep…._

Just then his mental shields cracked and wavered. It felt like an electric shock, a pain worse than any punishment of the Talosians…a real kind of pain like she hadn’t felt since the shuttle accident.

 _Chris?_ she gasped. Whatever he was blocking off with his mind, it was awful.

She felt his mind slipping away, falling down, down into darkness…it felt like he was losing consciousness. She tried to find something to hold onto. There was a room, a white ceiling...a bed?

A hospital bed?

 _What’s going on?_ she asked the Talosians, almost in tears. _What happened to him?_ Christopher Pike was the best man she’d ever known. He didn’t deserve this, whatever it was.

She pushed her way forward with the help of the Talosian minds until she could see the room. It was a hospital room, as she had feared, and it was in the intensive care ward on Starbase 11. Pike was lying in the bed with almost his whole body covered in bandages, and even the patches of skin she could see looked blistered and angry. Pain relievers were being pumped into his body, but the indicator above the bed showed that he was still in a terrible amount of pain even though he was barely conscious. What had happened to her kind, gentle Chris?

She went over to the bed, crying quietly. The room was dim and lit mostly with the lights on the monitors above him. _Please, someone, anyone!_ she called out into telepathic space. _Can’t someone help him?_ She searched for Number One, for Spock, and even for the ghost of Katrina Cornwell, but she didn’t get an answer. Where was Starfleet? If he was such a celebrated hero, adored by people all across the galaxy, where were the people who should be taking care of him? 

He shouldn’t be here alone on Christmas.

She reached over, almost afraid to touch him in case she hurt him, and stroked the hair that was left, brushing it back from his forehead. She leaned over and pressed the lightest of kisses to the bandage on his face.

_Christopher, I don’t know if you can hear me, or if you even care anymore, but you don’t have to be alone._

Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought his knitted forehead relaxed very slightly, as if he knew she was there and it brought him peace.

**********************

An hour later, an orderly came in to check on Fleet Captain Pike. The young man nearly jumped out of his skin as he walked through the door. For a moment, he thought he’d seen a woman bending over the captain’s bed and holding his hand, but she had vanished like a ghost.

He shook his head and blinked. He must have been on his shift too long…he’d started imagining things.


End file.
